N3: An open source portable audio player

[may1937]

Hi, I'm from the Neuros community and thought you all might be interested in a project we have brewing to build a portable audio player as a community. Neuros has schematics for their current device available, and I don't think it would take too much work to turn it into a sweet open source, community designed, portable audio player.

You can check out my overall plan: http://open.neurosaudio.com/node/884

We are going to have a meeting on the 30th to discuss Phase I of this plan. If anyone here is interested, I'd love to get a discussion started here, and bring some of the ideas to the meeting.

[linuxstb]

My view is that we already have about 20 open source portable audio players - i.e. everything Rockbox currently runs on.  The fact that all these devices were sold as closed-source proprietory products doesn't matter to me - the end result is a product running an open source firmware.

It does sound like an interesting and fun project, but in order to attract developers and users, but IMO it must compete favourably with the existing Rockbox targets.

I'm sure everyone is going to list their own feature requests for the "perfect" DAP and my personal one is storage size.  My wish would be for a player that can accept SATA 2.5" drives - a Rockbox-capable DAP with a 250GB drive would be very tempting...

I don't know if this is economically viable but something that would make this project stand out from all the other DAPs in the world would be to make the hardware modular - allowing users to pick and choose between various components (motherboard, LCD, case, storage, battery) to assemble their ideal player - it will be impossible to agree a single design (or even two or three designs) that please everyone.

This assembly could either be done by the end-user or the resellers/distributors.

The iaudio X5/M5 and X5L/M5L are a nice example - the X5/M5 can take dual-platter 1.8" drives, and a smaller battery, and the X5L/M5L take single-platter drives and a larger battery - allowing the user to decide on the compromise between capacity and battery life.  

I also agree with Bagder's comment on your mailing list - these kinds of discussions would seem better suited (at least initially) to a mailing list/forum, rather than the chaos of an IRC meeting.

[Llorean]

Just as a note, I don't know who the target audience of this player is, but I feel that with the strength of the iPod, and the amount of money Microsoft is probably willing to lose on their Zune, an audience of interest would probably be those beyond just the basic DAP users.

Having the ability to use a 2.5" drive is a start. Yes it makes it a bit bigger, but if it offers expandability that's very valuable to the kind of people who are interested in open source. If modular hardware isn't an option, then having recording features at least on par with the H100 series would seem quite valuable to me. There isn't (to my knowledge) a particularly good DAP/Recorder combo that I've seen around recently, and that combined with open source firmware for codec flexibility and extensible recording options, and the ability to put very large storage in, is probably going to be of interest to the taper community who seem quite fond of what Rockbox has done for the iRiver players as it is.

[Bagder]

Yes, the primary goal must be to create an attractive player hardware-wise and it must also be able to reach an audience that doesn't care about it being open source or Rockbox.

The question is then of course how you make a new player today to compete in a market flooded with existing players, be it with open source or not...

[markun]

Perhaps it could use a Blackfin CPU (SoC) ? Analog Devices (ADI) provide all the documentation and are very friendly to the open source community. I was told by Marc Hoffman from ADI that they are releasing a 525c which is designed to be used in DAPs and to be very cheap.

http://www.analog.com/en/epProd/0,,ADSP-BF525C,00.html

[may1937]

My view is that we already have about 20 open source portable audio players - i.e. everything Rockbox currently runs on.  The fact that all these devices were sold as closed-source proprietory products doesn't matter to me - the end result is a product running an open source firmware.

It does sound like an interesting and fun project, but in order to attract developers and users, but IMO it must compete favourably with the existing Rockbox targets.

I'm sure everyone is going to list their own feature requests for the "perfect" DAP and my personal one is storage size.  My wish would be for a player that can accept SATA 2.5" drives - a Rockbox-capable DAP with a 250GB drive would be very tempting...

I don't know if this is economically viable but something that would make this project stand out from all the other DAPs in the world would be to make the hardware modular - allowing users to pick and choose between various components (motherboard, LCD, case, storage, battery) to assemble their ideal player - it will be impossible to agree a single design (or even two or three designs) that please everyone.

This assembly could either be done by the end-user or the resellers/distributors.

The iaudio X5/M5 and X5L/M5L are a nice example - the X5/M5 can take dual-platter 1.8" drives, and a smaller battery, and the X5L/M5L take single-platter drives and a larger battery - allowing the user to decide on the compromise between capacity and battery life.  

I also agree with Bagder's comment on your mailing list - these kinds of discussions would seem better suited (at least initially) to a mailing list/forum, rather than the chaos of an IRC meeting.

Your sentiment regarding Rockbox supported players is well taken. (Great work on all this by the way! I'm just now trying to load up Rockbox on an iAudio X5L to check it out.) I see releasing schematics as being a huge factor in terms of openness, but you guys probably don't care much about that as it seems you have some great reverse engineering skills. Audio quality is also a major goal of the project.

I'm not exactly sure of the hardware modifications needed to add a hard drive, but keeping cost down is very important for the project to succeed. We don't have a community member with hardware design experience, so we are probably going to have to hire someone. This may exclude a hard drive from the initial run, although I also would love to have one if it is a reasonable goal.

Neuros' previous player, the N2, had removable storage components, and that didn't end up working so well because of added cost/complexity. I think there is potential for some modularity within a given form factor, but again, we have to keep it reasonable, and we probably wouldn't see this on the initial run.

[may1937]

Just as a note, I don't know who the target audience of this player is, but I feel that with the strength of the iPod, and the amount of money Microsoft is probably willing to lose on their Zune, an audience of interest would probably be those beyond just the basic DAP users.

Having the ability to use a 2.5" drive is a start. Yes it makes it a bit bigger, but if it offers expandability that's very valuable to the kind of people who are interested in open source. If modular hardware isn't an option, then having recording features at least on par with the H100 series would seem quite valuable to me. There isn't (to my knowledge) a particularly good DAP/Recorder combo that I've seen around recently, and that combined with open source firmware for codec flexibility and extensible recording options, and the ability to put very large storage in, is probably going to be of interest to the taper community who seem quite fond of what Rockbox has done for the iRiver players as it is.

Yes, we were hoping that by supporting high quality audio input and output, it might appeal to a more "audiophile" type crowd. And maybe some tapers could replace more complex setups with a single device. Storage is important, of course, but due to cost we may have to settle for 4/8GB of flash, at least initially.

[may1937]

Yes, the primary goal must be to create an attractive player hardware-wise and it must also be able to reach an audience that doesn't care about it being open source or Rockbox.

The question is then of course how you make a new player today to compete in a market flooded with existing players, be it with open source or not...

Hopefully we can come up with some distinguishing features. But, being a community project, the more immediate goal is to settle on an initial feature set, and get some boards out to interested community members. If we can keep costs down, we might have a chance of breaking even on expenses.

If the community embraces the player, then maybe we can think about turning it into a consumer product.

[may1937]

Perhaps it could use a Blackfin CPU (SoC) ? Analog Devices (ADI) provide all the documentation and are very friendly to the open source community. I was told by Marc Hoffman from ADI that they are releasing a 525c which is designed to be used in DAPs and to be very cheap.

http://www.analog.com/en/epProd/0,,ADSP-BF525C,00.html

I am not a hardware engineer, but dropping a new CPU in sounds expensive. If we did go this route, wouldn't it make more sense to use something already supported by Rockbox? The neat thing about dm320, is most of the "hard" software work is done, at least for the Linux side. And since it's mostly an ARM, I wouldn't think getting Rockbox running would be too difficult.

On a side note, my current project for work involves an ADI part, and I have had an absolutely horrible experience with it. Their documentation is incomplete, my support contact won't return my phone calls, and their development tools are atrocious.

[petur]

On a side note, my current project for work involves an ADI part, and I have had an absolutely horrible experience with it. Their documentation is incomplete, my support contact won't return my phone calls, and their development tools are atrocious.

I can only agree on this point, having worked on a project involving a blackfin, I agree that the AD tools were expensive junk (certainly the debugger and the buggy compiler). Of course this is not an issue if we're not using them

[Bagder]

The neat thing about dm320, is most of the "hard" software work is done, at least for the Linux side. And since it's mostly an ARM, I wouldn't think getting Rockbox running would be too difficult.

Rockbox has no pieces of Linux in it and Rockbox currently doesn't run on any dm320 target...

For my views on the dm320 arch, I posted some on the Neuros-DM320 list:

http://groups.google.com/group/Neuros-DM320Hardware/browse_thread/thread/b64fa011bc2c22b5

[ZincAlloy]

Yes, we were hoping that by supporting high quality audio input and output, it might appeal to a more "audiophile" type crowd. And maybe some tapers could replace more complex setups with a single device. Storage is important, of course, but due to cost we may have to settle for 4/8GB of flash, at least initially.

I don't think 4/8 GB of storage would appeal to the "audiophile type crowd".

[GodEater]

I don't think 4/8 GB of storage would appeal to the "audiophile type crowd".

I agree - having such a tiny amount of storage would make this extremely un-interesting for me.

[Llorean]

How would using a CompactFlash drive for storage compare? Still flash, they can offload the cost of large storage on the purchaser, and more flexible for the user?

[may1937]

Rockbox has no pieces of Linux in it and Rockbox currently doesn't run on any dm320 target...

I realize Rockbox does not use Linux, my point was that we already have a bootstrapped software environment for the hardware, including source. Surely, that would help a Rockbox port?